IN the last lecture we began to explain what the Prophet says, that when God redeemed his people he would be so propitious
as to blot out all their sins. We said also that the Prophet shows that the people had for just reasons been treated with
severity. Here then we have to observe the justice of God in all his judgments. For the Prophet reminds us that the Jews could
not have been reconciled to God, except they acknowledged that they
had been justly punished. And hence we learn also a useful doctrine, that whenever God smites us with his rods, we are not
only to seek that relief may be given us from external evils or sorrow, but that God may also forgive us. The reason also
is to be observed, for the Prophet teaches us that there would be no iniquity because God would be propitious. We hence learn
that there were also just reasons why God chastised his people, but that as he designed to forgive their sins he became their
deliverer. Let us then know that we are counted just before God, not because he sees no iniquities in us, but because he
freely forgives them. It is, in short, the only true way of being reconciled to God, when he buries as it were our sins so
as never to call them to judgment.

Moreover, that this favor properly belongs to the kingdom of Christ may be gathered from the thirty-first chapter, where the
Prophet, having spoken of the new covenant, lays down this as the principal thing,

and he uses here the same verb. This promise then ought not to be confined to that short time when the people returned from
their Babylonian exile, but ought on the contrary to be extended to the kingdom of Christ, for it was then that this prophecy
was fully accomplished, because our sins do not appear before God when he is reconciled to us.

Yet the Prophet intimates that this favor would not be general, for he adds that God would be propitious only to the remnant; and it was needful to express this, because the faithful after their return might have otherwise desponded, when they saw
that a few only of the people were restored. Had their restoration been indiscriminately promised, the faith of the godly
might have faltered on seeing that almost the whole people
disregarded the favor offered to them; for a part only of the tribe of Judah availed themselves of the kindness of Cyrus
and Darius; and the ten tribes chose rather to dwell in Chaldea and in other places. And it was not only once that God restricted
the promise given here; for it is said by Isaiah,

“Were thy people as the sand of the sea,
a remnant only shall be saved.” (Isaiah 10:21, 22)

The people gloried in their number and boasted of what had been said to Abraham,

“Number if thou canst the stars of heaven and the sand of the sea, so shall thy seed be.” (Genesis 15:5)

God then shows that the Jews were greatly mistaken when they thought that they would be always in a safe state. Hence the
Prophet says here that God would not be propitious indiscriminately to all, but to those whom he would make the remnant. And God also intimates that it was to be ascribed to his gratuitous goodness that any remained alive, according to what is
said in
Isaiah 1:9,

“Except some seed had been left to us, we must have been as Gomorrah, and like to Sodom,”

God then declares here that the remnant would not otherwise be saved than through his gratuitous mercy, as Paul also says,
that the Jews were not to hope for salvation, except through the free mercy of God. (Romans 11:5.) And he especially noticed this passage and similar passages, because the Jews then in opposing the Gospel raised the objection,
that they were the seed of Abraham, and the chosen people; but Paul gave them this answer, that it was not a new thing that
God gathered a small remnant from his people; and he assigns as the cause his gratuitous election. It now follows, —